Mobile communication devices are becoming an integral part of users' business and personal lives. As memory capacity improves, a mobile communication device can be configured to include a contact datum in the form of a telephone book of nearly any size. A telephone book may therefore contain hundreds or more entries. A telephone book may also contain many entries of the same name, particularly where a certain name is a common name.
For some users, their telephone book stored in the memory of a mobile communication device may contain so many entries that accessing an entry of the telephone book may prove to be cumbersome. For example, to access an entry a user can scroll through the list of entries on the display screen of the mobile communication device. To scroll through the list, the user can start at the first entry to find the sought entry. However, when there are hundreds of entries, scrolling through so many entries may be time consuming.
Methods for reducing the amount of time to find an entry may include text searching methods. However, in a text searching method, a user must enter the text for searching via the keypad to initiate the text search. As with scrolling, entering the text of an entry into the keypad of the device may be time consuming.
Particularly for telephone books with many entries, it would be beneficial to minimize user actions required to achieve a desired record selection. It would further be beneficial to reduce the amount of time for a user to access a particular entry. It would be beneficial, especially for telephone books having many similar entries, if the entries were available with easy access.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of embodiments of the present invention.